cutting and stacking, watching, painting

I spend an hour or an hour and a half every day cutting and carting broken branches to the street. About four mounded very high cart loads a day. Saturday my four cart loads were the branches scattered on the back half of the big backyard behind the destroyed pecan trees as Marc was mowing back there. Yesterday I only did three, being Sunday and all thought I would give myself a break, working on the smaller end branches of the huge limbs hanging down. The task seems endless. 

After I came in Saturday and cooled off sitting directly under the ceiling fan on high, I worked on my painting putting in the foliage in the distance on the far side of the lake. It’s a little dark I think and I may lift some of the pigment later. We’ll see. Plus I need to fudge the horizon line of the lake so it’s not such a straight hard line but I’ll do that after I do the wash of the blue sky reflecting on the lake which is next. I smoothed out the sky a bit by using a wet brush over the blue of the sky moving from left to right and I like it better.

9” x 6”

Saturday afternoon and early evening we binge watched Outer Range. We had already seen the first episode of the second season and we watched all but the last episode. Unfortunately Amazon has not renewed it for a third season even though it rates pretty high, apparently because it’s budget exceeded it’s financial return, so I don’t expect the last episode will resolve anything which is unfortunate because I really like it. It’s sort of sci-fi about two feuding ranch families with an anomaly on one of the ranches, a big black hole that comes and goes involving time travel and a mysterious mineral, and how these individual interact not only in present time but also in the past. Hard to explain and a lot of the time hard to know exactly what’s going on. But the second season has been really good so I’m very disappointed that it hasn’t been renewed.

Sunday I worked on the painting some more, not only reflecting the blue part of the sky but the whole lake surface. I need to add a little more blue tones in the gray part under the foliage line but I’m pretty happy with it so far. I do think the green line is a too dark, which is kind of ironic because when I was taking the class I had a hard time getting the colors dark enough, but I’m not sure I can do much about it. I tried lifting some of the pigment but it doesn't seem any lighter. Next I’m going to work on the bare trees in the distance.

Well, another morning’s work outside awaits after breakfast.